Stewart Hotston is joining us today to talk about his novel, Project Hanuman. Here’s the publisher’s description:
The Arcology, a pan galactic utopia where trillions live online, forever and in bliss, is missing. Praveenthi ‘Prab’ Saal, who tired of heaven and left for the real world and pilot Kercher, printed into a physical body to serve time for sedition against the Arcology, must discover what is going on, or it could be the end of everyone and everything that calls the Arcology home.
Their only resource is their living ship, carrying all the Arcology’s knowledge and culture. But this nameless ship is dying – slowly being swallowed whole by the universe of information it’s been asked to hold.
The three embark on a quest to save themselves and, just maybe, the Arcology as well.
What’s Stewart’s favorite bit?
It’s not a spoiler to say that things go very, very wrong for Prab, one of the main characters in Project Hanuman, right from the start of the book. Despite living on the edges of a world she’s rejected, when it disappears it turns her entire life upside down.
Neither Prab, Kercher nor the ship they’re on were built for the end of the world but you don’t get to choose the times in which you live.
My favorite bit though was figuring out how someone like Prab lived in the day to day. At her fingertips she has all the knowledge of a spacefaring civilization that has conquered half the galaxy, and which lives in uncounted online worlds of its own making. There is literally no piece of information she can’t access if she wants it.
More than that, she lives in a printed body, one which by design could learn to speak Chinese and Xhosa in the time it takes me to write those words here. She could download all of gravitational physics or the recipe for the perfect sourdough with just a thought.
Prab, even outside of the utopia that she’s rejected, still has access to everything.
My favorite bit was realizing that for Prab she’d realized at some point she needed something of her own, something authentic which the perfection of the home she’d left behind couldn’t replicate in a momentary shrug of its shoulders.
It was obvious to my geeky bibliophilic brain that it should be books – real actual physical books. Prab has a library she’s carefully cultivated across her time in a printed body on the outside of paradise. She knows it’s odd, she knows she’s largely alone in her obsession but, like me I think, she doesn’t care – having books in her hands, knowing that she’s got something which feels and smells like its own thing is the goal.
Prab’s little collection of books also represent her identity – the thing she’s prepared to spend her wealth on rather than the alternatives. She orders books from outside the reach of her people, from places where they still use *gasp* money.
And when the world goes to pieces it’s to her books she goes.
There’s a very long running radio show in the UK called Desert Island Discs that asks what songs you’d take with you if you were shipwrecked on a desert island.
Prab gets this choice in real time and she chooses a small selection of her most precious books that then accompany her through the rest of the story. Those books are Prab’s heart, a reminder of who she has chosen to be rather than who others thought she should be.
Again, that comes back to who I am – someone who frequently pronounces words wrong because the first place I came across them was in print (my favorite is awry which until I was in my late thirties I thought was pronounced awe-ree rather than Ah-rye).
Prab’s books don’t save the day; they aren’t some secret knowledge saved in the nick of time. They are my favorite bit because they’re Prab’s history, her sense of identity, the rock which keeps her the right shape when the world is pressing in from all sides.
I loved writing this tiny detail into the story because it’s a little bit of me in the world building. I love books and finding a way to give them life in a universe where everyone lives online, where all possible knowledge is available at the blink of an eye felt like a tiny, personal triumph about what the future might look like.
LINKS:
BIO:
With a Celtic-Indian mother and a father of North African/Roma descent, Stewart Hotston is a somewhat confused second-generation immigrant living in the UK. His novels include the BFS and Subjective Chaos finalist, Entropy of Loss as well as the tech thriller Tangle’s Game and the science fiction novels based in UBISoft’s Watch Dogs universe – Daybreak Legacy and Stars & Stripes. He is also co-owner of one of the UK’s largest LARP systems, Curious Pastimes, and is an internationally competitive historical fencer with a PhD in theoretical physics.
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